The delight which Mr Davy...

The delight which Mr Davy experienced when he first saw the minute globules of ' (the new metal) burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, was witnessed by his relative and assistant Mr . 'He could not contain his joy—he actually danced about the room in ecstatic delight, and some little time was required for him to compose himself sufficiently to continue the experiment.'

A character is a completely...

A character is a completely fashioned will. (vollkommen gebildeter Wille).

Having departed from your house,...

Having departed from your house, turn not back; for the furies will be your attendants.

The value of many men...

The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.

The novelist is haunted by...

The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been', a struggle, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history. And the novelist, at his best, must feel himself heir to a continuous tradition. He must feel himself, as I think Tolstoy did in War and Peace or Sholokov in And Quiet Flows the Don, swimming, struggling, defining himself, in the mainstream of his people's historical drama.

Eliphas never abandoned his belief...

Eliphas never abandoned his belief that the fate of man is the result of justice, that we do not know all our shortcomings for which we are punished, nor the way how we incur the punishment through them.

The best university that can...

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

Science... the ways it does...

Science... the ways it does its calculating that approximately nobody going in at a basic level can gain any sense of the whole.

It is irreverent to the...

It is irreverent to the Gods to give you this demonstration, but for your sakes it shall be done.

Dispose thy Soul to all...

Dispose thy Soul to all good and necessary things!

It is a mistake to...

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

Language is a part of...

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Maimonides, the great Jewish theologian...

Maimonides, the great Jewish theologian and historian, who at one time was almost deified by his countrymen and afterward treated as a heretic, remarks, that the more absurd and void of sense the Talmud seems the more sublime is the secret meaning. This learned man has successfully demonstrated that the Chaldean Magic, the science of Moses and other learned thaumaturgists was wholly based on an extensive knowledge of the various and now forgotten branches of natural science. Thoroughly acquainted with all the resources of the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, experts in occult chemistry and physics, psychologists as well as physiologists, why wonder that the graduates or adepts instructed in the mysterious sanctuaries of the temples, could perform wonders, which even in our days of enlightenment would appear supernatural? It is an insult to human nature to brand magic and the occult science with the name of imposture. To believe that for so many thousands of years, one-half of mankind practiced deception and fraud on the other half, is equivalent to saying that the human race was composed only of knaves and incurable idiots. Where is the country in which magic was not practised? At what age was it wholly forgotten? p. 19

The law of the table...

The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends.

I have learned never to...

I have learned never to reject one of Fuller's outrageous statements without careful consideration, and even hesitated to call "Sum of angels around each vertex" in the rough manuscript a misprint. The truth has usually turned out far stranger than Buckminster Fuller!

The data that can bear...

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

No thing great is created...

No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Better be mute, than dispute...

Better be mute, than dispute with the Ignorant.

It is not how things...

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)

Disobedience, when it is not...

Disobedience, when it is not criminally but morally, religiously, or politically motivated, is almost always a collective act, and it is justified by the values of the collectivity and the mutual engagements of its members.

The poor, short lone fact...

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

How can we design improvement...

How can we design improvement in large systems without understanding the whole system, and if the answer is that we cannot, how is it possible to understand the whole system?

Be not swept off your...

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

The games which can be...

The games which can be built up from the simple idea of dots and lines... can be a productive source of teaching material. After all, s provided the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans with important theorems about the summing of series.

As for civilization, from which...

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

We are asleep. Our Life...

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

Techniques employ four qualities that...

Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.

The person who screams, or...

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.

We must face the reality...

We must face the reality that the enemies offer: what's really happening in the human world is politics, or morality, or religion, or aesthetics. This confrontation with reality is totally different from the rational approach, because the reality of the enemies cannot be conceptualized, approximated, or measured.

Let a man once overcome...

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

An evil may be real,...

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

Whatever moral rules you have...

Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?... Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law.(50).

It was Pythagoras who first...

It was Pythagoras who first called heaven kosmos, because it is perfect, and "adorned" with infinite beauty and living beings.

Let us pardon him his...

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

If a lion could talk,...

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Heart – “It is absolutely...

Heart – “It is absolutely certain that God does exist.”Head – “But, my dear boy! Existence is one of my categories, and you have no right to use it.”Heart – “So much the better, my Aristotle!”

For every minute you are...

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

The triumph of the industrial...

The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of the country far more than the most splendid victories of successful war.

Friendship is almost always the...

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

As long as the aristocracy...

As long as the aristocracy is healthy, the name of the sovereign sacred to it, and it loves the monarchy passionately, the State is unshakeable, whatever be the qualities of the king. But once it loses its greatness, its pride, its energy, its faith, the spirit withdraws, the monarchy is dead, and its cadaver is left to the worms.

When we run over libraries,...

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Ionian philosophers... had sought to...

Ionian philosophers... had sought to identify a first principle for all things. Thales had thought to find this in water, but others preferred to think of air or fire as the basic element. The Pythagoreans had taken a more abstract direction, postulating that number... was the basic stuff behind phenomena; this numerical atomism... had come under attack by the followers of Parmenides of Elea... The fundamental tenet of the was the unity and permanence of being... contrasted with the Pythagorean ideas of multiplicity and change. Of Parmenides' disciples the best known was Zeno the Eleatic... who propounded arguments to prove the inconsistency in the concepts of multiplicity and divisibility.

The mob has always behaved...

The mob has always behaved in this way—eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured.

Aim at being loved without...

Aim at being loved without being admired.

The fiction of an ideal...

The fiction of an ideal language composed of pure atomic statements is as metaphysical as the fiction of Laplace's 'spirit'. Scientific language, with its ever growing equipment of systematic symbol formations, can by no means be regarded as an approximation to such an ideal language.

It is not easy to...

It is not easy to devise a cure for such a state of things (the declining taste for science). The most obvious remedy is to provide the educated classes with a series of works on popular and practical science, freed from mathematical symbols and technical terms, written in simple and perspicuous language, and illustrated by facts and experiments which are level to the capacity of ordinary minds.

"In America literary reputations come...

"In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."

Never have nations been civilized,...

Never have nations been civilized, except by religion.

People who invented the word...

People who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, Be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings.

It's only by thinking even...

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.